• Glossary
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Local area network (LAN) - a group of
computers and associated devices that share a
common communications line and typically
share the resources of a single processor or
server.
Network Operations Center - A place from
which a network is supervised, monitored, and
maintained. Also referred to as the Network
Management Center (NMC).
Network Address Translation (NAT)- a method
of connecting multiple computers to the Internet
(or any other IP network) using one IP address.
Performance enhancing proxy (PEP) - modules
that provide TCP acceleration. PEP is used to
improve the performance of the Internet
protocols on network paths where native
performance suffers due to characteristics of a
link or subnetwork on the path.
Private IP addressing - A computer on the
Internet is identified by its IP address. In order
to avoid address conflicts, IP addresses are
publicly registered with the Network
Information Centre (NIC). Computers on private
TCP/IP LANs however do not need public
addresses, since they do not need to be accessed
by the public. For this reason, the NIC has
reserved certain addresses that will never be
registered publicly. These are known as private
IP addresses.
Router - a device or, in some cases, software in a
computer, that determines the next network
point to which a packet should be forwarded
toward its destination.
Signal quality factor (SQF) - an integer value
from 0-99 that indicates the strength of the
received satellite signal relative to noise.
Subnet mask - a 32-bit value that is used to
distinguish the network ID from the host ID in
an arbitrary IP address. Each host on a network
requires a subnet mask.
TCP/IP internet protocol suite - the basic
communication language or protocol of the
Internet.
TCP Acceleration - see PEP.
Transmission control protocol (TCP) - a set of
rules (protocol) used along with the Internet
Protocol (IP) to send data in the form of
message units between computers over the
Internet. While IP takes care of handling the
actual delivery of the data, TCP takes care of
keeping track of the individual units of data
(called packets) that a message is divided into
for efficient routing through the Internet.
Turbo Page - software that prefetches objects
from Web sites you visit to speed up surfing.